The phone rings, and a whisper says two words: “Seven days.” Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) has just watched a videotape at Shelter Mountain Inn, and from that call on the clock is running. Gore Verbinski’s The Ring reached American theaters through DreamWorks on October 18, 2002. It is a remake of the 1998 Japanese film, which was itself drawn from Koji Suzuki’s 1991 novel. It grossed $249.3 million worldwide. It also did something stranger: it sent Hollywood shopping for Asian horror.

Ehren Kruger’s script gives Rachel a job that suits the story. She is a Seattle journalist, so when something frightening turns up she investigates it. Her niece Katie dies one week after watching the tape, and Katie’s friends die in bizarre accidents at the same time. Katie’s mother Ruth (Lindsay Frost) asks her sister to find out why. The legend is laid out in the opening scene, in a conversation between Katie (Amber Tamblyn) and her friend Becca, so the rules are on the table before anyone is in danger. Why those rules exist is the question the rest of the film has to answer.

The sound deserves the most credit. Horror Movie Talk argues that the heavy lifting in The Ring is done by the sound design, and that much of the film is quiet and muted. I agree. The dread comes from what you hear and from what you are denied. Hans Zimmer’s score, with cues such as “Rachel Alone”, “A Lighthouse & The Fly” and “Before You Die You See the Ring”, rarely tells you how to feel. It hums underneath the scenes and lets the silence do the rest. The phone call that ends Rachel’s viewing of the tape is the clearest example: a ringing room phone, a whisper, nothing more. It scares more than most films manage with a monster on screen.

Watts carries the picture. She plays Rachel as a skeptic first and a frightened mother second, and the film is smart enough to let the first stance erode slowly, one unexplained event at a time. The performance won her Best Actress at the 29th Saturn Awards, and the film took Best Horror Film. David Dorfman, as Rachel’s eight-year-old son Aidan, is asked to be eerie and vulnerable at once, and when Aidan watches the tape the stakes stop being abstract. Martin Henderson, as Noah, Rachel’s ex-husband and a video analyst, is given less to work with. He is useful to the plot and thin as a person, and the film seems to know it.

The investigation itself is built like a chain of clues. Rachel travels to Moesko Island to speak to Richard Morgan (Brian Cox), and on the ferry a horse jumps overboard to its death. She learns that Richard’s wife Anna (Shannon Cochran), after four consecutive miscarriages, adopted a girl named Samara, who could etch images onto objects and into people’s minds, and who tormented her parents and their horses. Noah, meanwhile, goes to Eola Psychiatric Hospital and finds Samara’s file, which contains a missing video last seen by Richard. A fake birth certificate, a loft in the barn where the Morgans kept the girl away from the world, a tree hidden behind the wallpaper that matches one at the inn: each discovery points to the next.

This is where the film wobbles. The pacing is uneven, and Noah’s trip to the hospital feels less like a scene than a delivery of the next clue. The urban-legend scaffolding is familiar, and some revelations arrive a beat late. The mystery holds, but now and then the characters are handed answers they have not quite earned, because the script needs to move on.

The themes are sturdier than the plotting. Rachel’s vision in the well shows Anna dumping Samara into it, where the girl survived for one week. Samara is no demon from nowhere: she was adopted under false papers, shut in a loft, and finally thrown away. The video in which she apologizes for her actions and explains that “they won’t stop” gives her a sad, almost pleading voice. Richard insists she is evil, then electrocutes himself. The film asks what happens to a child nobody wanted to understand. A Salon piece from 2003 read The Ring as a sampler of contemporary paranoia, listing the taboo of premarital sex and the evils of infanticide among its ingredients. That reading is a stretch in places, but infanticide is plainly in the film.

Critics met the film with mixed-to-positive reviews on release. The Roger Ebert site carries a review that calls it a unique horror film that doesn’t insult the viewer’s intelligence and holds most of its intense scares until near the end. I would put the praise slightly differently. The Ring respects its audience by trusting slowness, and by treating dread as something that builds, not something to be spent early.

The studios noticed. The Grudge arrived in 2004 and Dark Water in 2005, both American remakes of Asian horror films, and they came in the wake of this film’s box office.

The middle stretch sags, and Noah never becomes a character. But the film works. It moves slowly and quietly, and the sadness under the scares is what stays with you: by the end, the drowned girl in the well matters to it more than the fright she causes.